My friend Dee had been working at our predominantly white church for a few years when we became friends. We often talked about getting together but life got in the way for both of us. Then life brought us naturally together. Our boys ended up at the same school, and our families entered into a beautifully deep relationship none of us was expecting.
 
Some days, my husband would pick up her son from school. He’d hang out at our house until she could come pick him up after work. She and I would often sit in my living room chatting about life and church and God and being working moms.
 
These were sacred moments, and we had conversations that revealed the racist undertones of White American Evangelicalism that I knew were there, but I didn’t know know were there. Dee’s knowledge was intimate, her experience deep. As I recently listened to Austin Channing Brown’s book, I’m Still Here, I thought a lot about my conversations with Dee.
 
“White Supremacy is a tradition that must be named in a religion that must be renounced. When this work has not been done, those who live in whiteness become oppressive whether intentional or not.” — Austin Channing Brown
 
While Dee was still working at the church, my husband, Andrew, and I decided to leave. That decision was confirmed after a conversation with the pastor. There were several reasons, but the months leading up to the 2016 election cemented that decision. The amount of rhetoric around how Trump would lead us toward a more Christian politic in our nation made me want to flip tables. It seemed every white Christian around me had excused his immoral behavior because he was quote unquote conservative and would put conservative judges in the courts. His openly racist, misogynistic, and anti-immigrant talk was clearly unchristian to me (which led me to write the article The Abortions of White American Evangelicals that distanced me even more from the spiritual community I had been a part of for a good portion of my adult life). Yet so many of my nonwhite Christians friends saw Trump differently, they saw his immoral behavior and called it out. Andrew and I knew we were at a turning point in our faith walk. We could not continue to attend this church. We had the privilege to walk away.
 
I was questioning our church’s leadership as much as Dee was. And, although I was planning on teaching a course the following semester with a program within the church, when I left, they took my book out of the bookstore and I was not allowed to teach the course. Still, the act of resistance was easier for me and my family—the church wasn’t a source of economic income.
 
Dee and I would have two-hour-long conversations twice a week during that time. When Dee left our house, I’d often meditate on them: how much she’d spur me to deeper faith, the way she’d talk about the Spirit, and how social justice didn’t seem to be an add-on to her faith but rather part of its DNA. Our connection was strong, and we were able to be honest with each other in ways I’ve never been with anyone else.
 
I wondered why my friends in positions of church leadership weren’t listening to her. Her voice was so prophetic, yet she was so often silenced. But why? Now, years later, I realize I’ve still be wondering the same thing. Brown shed light on my unanswered question:
 
“This is why white American churches remain so far from experiencing anything resembling reconciliation. The white Church considers power its birthright rather than its curse. And so, rather than seeking reconciliation, they stage moments of racial harmony that don't challenge the status quo. They organize worship services where the choirs of two racially different churches sing together, where a pastor of a different race preaches a couple of times a year, where they celebrate MLK but don't acknowledge current racial injustices. Acts like these can create beautiful moments of harmony and goodwill, but since they don't change the underlying power structure at the organization, it would be misleading to call them acts of reconciliation. Even worse, when they're not paired with greater change, diversity efforts can have the opposite of their intended effect. They keep the church feeling good, innocent, maybe even progressive, all the while preserving the roots of injustice.” (Italics mine)
 
Power is a greedy thing. And sadly, its expansive ruthlessness is often cloaked in “Doing God’s will” rhetoric. But God showed us a very different example of true power in the life of Christ. God’s equation for power is more like: humility equals power. And honestly, that equation sucks. It goes against all of our earthly values, all of our American values. All of our American Dreams. It’s not easy to accept Jesus for all of who He is. The full Christ is offensively countercultural.
 
“One of the most meaningful passages of Scripture for me is found in the New Testament, where Jesus leads a one-man protest inside the Temple walls. Jesus shouts at the corrupt Temple officials, overturns furniture, sets animals free, blocks the doorways with his body, and carries a weapon—a whip—through the place. Jesus throws folks out the building, and in so doing creates space for the most marginalized to come in: the poor, the wounded, the children. I imagine the next day’s newspapers called Jesus’s anger destructive. But I think those without power would’ve said that his anger led to freedom—the freedom of belonging, the freedom of healing, and the freedom of participating as full members in God’s house.”
 
One of the saddest things about the racism of White Evangelicalism is that the Christ who is so sincerely proclaimed from the pulpit is not fully seen, expressed, or taught. I firmly believe that the robustness of the true Gospel of the Kingdom of God cannot be seen only from one perspective. Yet, it is most often the powerful in society—in ethnicity, in gender, in able-bodies, in economic status—that tell us who Jesus is. Yet they skip over the one-man protest Jesus and tell us (as I was often told growing up) that Jesus is the only one who is allowed to be angry because he’s the only one righteous enough to have just anger.
 
We so often talk about how we need to include the voices on the margins but silence those same voices even when they are already sitting at the table, when they are asking questions with answers that might reveal our greed for power, when they seem angry and we don’t want to ask why they are protesting against the status quo. When they kneel when we think they should stand, and stand when we think they should kneel. We silence Dee and Austin and so many others who have a prophetic perspective of Christ that we white Evangelicals desperately need. And it is to our collective detriment. We want their faces in our marketing pictures, maybe even their names on our payroll, but we don’t want their ideas, their initiatives, their pushback, their balance, their accountability, their prophecy. Because power is our birthright not our curse.
 
Dee no longer works for the church, and she’s flourishing in her new role. We no longer live near each other, but those long conversations remain deep and close to my heart, a constant reminder of the oppression of the white Church, and at the same time, a reminder of what deep spiritual community should be: iron sharpening iron, spurring each other on to greater works of faith.
 
“And even though the Church I love has been the oppressor as often as it has been the champion of the oppressed, I can’t let go of my belief in Church—in a universal body of belonging, in a community that reaches toward love in a world so often filled with hate. I continue to be drawn toward the collective participation of seeking good, even when that means critiquing the institution I love for its commitment to whiteness.” — Austin Channing Brown.


​

*author notes*
Everything in Purple is Austin Channing Brown's words from I'm Still Here which you can purchase on Amazon. Dee gave me permission to tell this portion of her story.

Genesis 1:2
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
 The word Spirit is the word Ruach in Hebrew. It means Breath or Wind.

Genesis 1:26-27 (NASB)
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
Some theologians read this and say that God’s image holds both male and female in it if in God’s likeness we are being created.
 
Genesis 2:18
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
 This word “helper” found here is the Hebrew word EZER which is also used several times throughout the Bible to describe God. (Ex. 18:4, Deut 33:7, 33:26, 33:29, Ps. 20:2, 33:20, 70:5, 89:17, 115:11, 121:1-2, 124:8, 146:5, Hosea 13:9)
 
Deuteronomy 32:10-12, 18
In a desert land he found him,
    in a barren and howling waste.
He shielded him and cared for him;
    he guarded him as the apple of his eye,
like an eagle that stirs up its nest
    and hovers over its young,
that spreads its wings to catch them
    and carries them aloft.
The Lord alone led him;
    no foreign god was with him.
(18) You deserted the Rock, who fathered you;
    you forgot the God who gave you birth.
 
Psalm 131:2
But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content.
 This is a Psalm of David where he is speaking directly to the LORD.

Isaiah 42:14
For a long time I have kept silent,
    I have been quiet and held myself back.
But now, like a woman in childbirth,
    I cry out, I gasp and pant.
 
Isaiah 49:15
Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
    and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
    I will not forget you!
 
Isaiah 66:12-13
I will extend peace to her like a river,
    and the wealth of nations like a flooding stream;
you will nurse and be carried on her arm
    and dandled on her knees.
 As a mother comforts her child,
    so will I comfort you;
    and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.
 Hosea 11:3-4It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
    taking them by the arms;
but they did not realize
    it was I who healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
    with ties of love.
To them I was like one who lifts
    a little child to the cheek,
    and I bent down to feed them.

Matthew 3:16-17 (NASB) along with Mark 1, Luke 3, John 1 — The Baptism of Jesus
After being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him,  and behold, a voice out of the heavens said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.

In the Baptism of Jesus, we read that the Spirit of God descended on Jesus like a dove and then a voice from heaven says, "This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased." We often assume that the voice from Heaven is Father God's voice. But God the Father is never mentioned in this passage. It is the Holy Spirit who is mentioned. What if it is the Holy Spirit who is doing the speaking? What if the Holy Spirit is saying, "This is My beloved Son." I think that if we can theorize that  it's God the Father's voice, we can also theorize that it's God the Mother's voice, who has sent a dove to her son to remind him in physical form she's there and she's watching over.

Matthew 23:37 & Luke 13:34
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.
 
Luke 15:8-10
Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.
 
I have to give Emmy Kegler credit for this one. I was listening to a podcast where she was being interviewed for her book One Coin Found, and she said that while studying scripture one day she was looking at the Lost Parables in Luke: The Lost Sheep, The Lost Coin, The Lost Son. She described how we often see God as the shepherd in the parable of the lost sheep. And we often see God as the father in the parable of the lost son, but rarely do we teach that God is the woman searching for her lost coin.
 
John 3:6
Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.

Females give birth, and it’s possible this is a figure of speech. Maybe all the verses above are merely figures of speech, metaphors and similes. But maybe in the same spirit (pun intended) my use of SHE is a figure of speech when referring to God. And if so, why do so many people see that as a faux pas? Because in many ways we cannot define God fully, so in every attempt to do so we are only using figures of speech.

Some theologians and some denominations are pushing for genderless pronouns for God. For me, I struggle with this and here’s why: taking the gender away from God makes God less understandable, less tangible, less relatable to me.  Andrew and I chose not to know the gender of our second child until the day of her birth. It was hard for me to connect with the baby in my belly because I didn't know what to call the baby: it, baby. That was all the language we had. The surprise on her birthday was big, but I would never do it again. I wanted to connect with the being inside of me during pregnancy and not knowing her gender during that time made it harder to connect.

I grew up in a Pentecostal-like church and the Holy Spirit was a very undefinable being, a ghost that slayed people and made weird things happen.  For a portion of my life, I ran away from the Holy Spirit because I feared the weirdness of Her. For more on that, check out my article at Missio Alliance.

Seeing the Holy Spirit as a mother-figure does three important things:

1. I see myself more fully as a reflection of God because I can imagine God as a woman. I know this may sound like I’m making God in my image, but it’s really about representation. I’ve always known God as Father. My whole life. And that’s not a bad thing, but God is bigger than Father. I think we all know this. Father is a great description of God, but it’s not the only one. God isn’t just Father. God is Savior, God is Lover, God is Brother, God is Friend.
2. The patriarchal hierarchy that I always thought was Divine dissipates with this view of God. I recognize most white evangelicals may think this is not OK to say. But as an Egalitarian Evangelical, I hold to it. I believe God wipes out all human hierarchies that say one human being is inherently higher than another. And I do believe that if women are not allowed in leadership in church, that act is saying that women are inherently less-than men.
3. I more clearly understand the Trinity which has always been a difficult concept to understand: 3 in 1. If the Trinity is family, then I more fully understand how multiple individual beings can unite and make one unit.

 
When I say that God is Mother, and when I use a feminine pronoun for God, I am not saying that God is only Mother or only female. I believe that God transcends gender. But here, I am saying that one way to see God is to see Mother God, alongside Father God, and Brother God. There is no disunity in the Trinity, though most of my life I secretly thought this was the case. I see the unity so much more when I see the Trinity as Divine Family.
 
I will leave you with the words of Jurgen Moltmann, a German reformed white male theologian. From his book The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation:

In Trinitarian theology, the image of the divine family raises the Spirit to the same rank as the Father, and puts the Spirit before the Son. Unless, like Ludwig Feuerbach, we wish to cast the image aside altogether as a pure projection of a family idyll, it does offer interesting corrective possibilities, if we compare it with the other pictures of the Trinity - Irenaeus's image of the One God with two hands, for example.
 
But more important than these speculative possibilities is the new definition of what it means for human beings to be the image of God. If the Trinity is a community, then what corresponds to it is the true human community of men and women. A certain de-patriarchalization of the picture of God results in a de-patriarchalization of the church too.
 
Of course by calling God the Holy Spirit 'Mother' we are merely putting parallel to the 'Father' another power as primal source. Psychologically speaking, inward liberation from the mother is as much a part of human development as emancipation from the Father. Like Israel's prophets, Christianity actually replaced the patriachal and matriarchal powers of origin by the messianism of the Child, as the bearer of hope and the beginning of the future. 'Unless you become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven' (Matt 18:3). But this is not brought out by the patriarchal or matriarchal image of God.

The following is from my 9-minute talk at the Q Conference: 

There is a daughter I mother
A daughter I love
But she is not mine & I am not hers,
Forever.
There is a mother she loves
A mother who loves her,
Forever.
For love is like water.
No human border can keep it out.
Yes, love is like water
It moves above in clouds, & below in soil
Yes, love is water.

In February 2018, I became a foster mom to a 5-year-old Honduran girl, Julia, who had been labeled an unaccompanied minor when she crossed into the U.S. But she wasn’t unaccompanied.
 
In October 2017, she along with her mother, Lupe, and stepdad, Carlos, were at the mercy of the smugglers they paid $7,500 to as they journeyed from Honduras through Guatemala and up through Mexico to arrive at the US.
 
But at the last stop in northern Mexico, the smugglers took Lupe, the mother, as a hostage. Julia and Carlos crossed the Rio Bravo, but Lupe stayed behind, and was exploited sexually.
 
It’s unclear why Customs & Border Protection separated Julia from her stepdad after processing them. Carlos was deported, and Julia was placed into a sponsorship family.
 
A few months later, Lupe, the mother escaped the smugglers and returned to her home in Honduras about the same time that little Julia entered foster care due to neglect from her sponsorship family.
 
Over a period of four months, with the creative and determined help of local social workers, the Honduran Consulate, and my family… in July of 2018, my husband Andrew and I traveled with Julia back to Honduras.
 
At the airport, when Julia saw her mother, she gleefully ran through the automatic doors. Lupe scooped her up and Julia laid her head on her mother’s shoulder, letting tears fall as her mother’s arms enveloped her. Wordless groans and squeezes communicated a love—a longing—a thirst—too deep for words. Eight months apart was eight months too long.
 
It was an incredibly beautiful and heartening reunification, complete with an Elsa-themed welcome-home party. If you don’t know who Elsa is, ask any 5-year-old girl. But be careful, you may get an unwanted song stuck in your head.
 
Love is like water after a long, hard battle with red tape working to undo what our government is responsible for. 2,737 children were forcibly separated from their parents when they crossed into the U.S. under the zero-tolerance policy between April and June of 2018. Reports are now showing thousands more had been separated prior to April, and more had been separated after June.
 
Love is like water no human border can keep it out. But,

• Toxic stress
• Disruption of brain development
• PTSD
• Increased anxiety
• Difficulty sleeping, learning, and forming relationships
• Suicide and suicide attempts

 
Are just some of the ways love has been contaminated by a source that SHOULD NOT have access to it.
 
Forced separation causes lifelong trauma for both children and parents. We don’t want to admit how familiar all of this is in America. African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Latino Americans have all suffered forced family separations at the hands of OUR government.
 
Beyond the zero-tolerance policy, families are separated every time ICE deports a parent, leaving behind children. I had an opportunity to visit an immigration detention facility in the fall of last year. There, I met another immigrant mother, Jovita. In front of her 6 and 8-year-old American daughters, Jovita was handcuffed by ICE and taken away from her decade-long home in Alabama. Her 8-year-old has since tried to commit suicide, in constant fear that ICE will come for her father just as they came for her mother.
 
In response to family separations my friend and poet Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros wrote a poem called Blessed Be the Mother. This is a small portion of her words:
 
On holy land, between a mesquite shrub
And a Mexican willow whose purple buds bow
In adoration, a mother sets out on a pilgrimage…
On holy land, between a tent city in Tornillo
And the lurking eyes of government institutions,
She prays her rosary, beads she must recall by faith
Since their confiscation at port of entry…
Blessed be the mother who spreads her wings in resistance.
Blessed be the mother who reclaims her land.
Blessed be the mother who meets the devil nose to nose
until her hijitas and hijitos are returned to her.
Bendita sea la madre.
 
These pilgrimages don’t always end in reunification. Bodies are beaten and broken when mothers try and try to cross a border fighting to bring life to the lives they brought into this world.
 
As Christians in the United States, we must look at the holy ground of our southern border. We must look and lament. [pause]
 
At my work, we talk a lot about the UNCONSCIOUS stories that guide our behavior. The question is, deep in our core, what do we believe a human being is?
 
If human beings are only their souls, then we can justify ANYTHING done to the bodies of our neighbors. Concerning ourselves only with eternal salvation, we become complicit in state- and church-sanctioned acts of dehumanization.
 
If human beings are only their economic worth, we then dehumanize our neighbors and ourselves as we filter the world through a scarcity mentality. WE, the followers of the God of communal abundance —the God of Jubilee— FEARFULLY decide there’s not enough to go around.
 
The Good News, the whole gospel of the kingdom of God, is that Jesus is making
all things new. Christ — being fully God and fully man — breathes abundant life into our humanity. He is the Good news to the poor, freedom to prisoners, freedom to the oppressed.
 
We must not forget that the body of Christ our King was beaten and bruised and broken as he fought to bring abundant life and light into this world. King Jesus is The King of the Broken.
 
We are ALL broken,
All seeking to flourish
All desperate for neighbors who seek our flourishing
All called to be neighbors who seek the flourishing of others.
 
Yes, love is water
Love is Living Water
And we are all thirsty.

In the past six months, I’ve had distinct experiences where I saw the Imago Dei both dehumanizingly oppressed and beautifully expressed in similar contexts.
 
At the end of September, I was able to visit to the Ursula Processing Center & the Port Isabel Detention Center in McAllen, Texas with Welcome an initiative with World Relief and the National Immigration Forum. (See the short film Eyes to See about my trip along with a discussion guide.) In January, I visited Walker County Faith & Character Based Prison in north Georgia. The juxtaposition of visiting these two institutions reveals how important the Imago Dei is for those on the margins of society.
 
Port Isabel Detention Center embodied what we often think of as justice, and what I call American Justice: locked doors, laws, rules, bars, cages, dehumanizing language, portable bathrooms with a door that only covers shoulders to knees, trauma, clear distinctions between Border Patrol and immigrant, silent immigrants with blank stares who rarely looked me in the eyes, fear evident in the eyes of those who did make contact, basic necessities and nothing more, orange and blue jump suits. Some Border Patrol officials confessed that they must turn off their emotions in order to do the job. Phrases like, ‘human being’ or ‘fellow’ or even ‘immigrant’ were not once used by BP. Instead I heard ‘alien’ and ‘illegal’. “The aliens also get $1 a day if they choose to work,” said the BP tour guide. A can of coke cost $1.75 in the vending machine nearby, reminding me how certain systems are built for transactions only, not for relationship. (Many more details of this event can be found in my upcoming book, Separated by the Border, to be published October 29, 2019 with InterVarsity Press.)
 
I came away from that experience with the thought engraved on my heart: If justice is what I seek for myself, I must become more and more aware that my justice is intertwined with the justice of all of humanity. Indeed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. words from Strength to Love came more alive within me.
 
Walker County Faith & Character Based Prison in north Georgia embodied what I know of as Biblical justice: no locks on lockers, rules that differ by levels depending on how long one has been at the prison, no bars, no cages, no dehumanizing language—in fact, without the [white] uniforms, I would have been confused as to who was staff and who was incarcerated, lots of eye contact (and I saw no fear in their eyes), education, education, and more education. The chaplain and the incarcerated spoke to each other and to our group as if they were old friends. Everyone I spoke to at Walker spoke to me with amazing public speaking skills, and each had several passions they were pursuing: painting, music, graphic art, theological studies, etc. I honestly forgot I was in a prison while being there. Each man (there are no women there) spoke about how much time he had already served and how much more he will have to serve. They spoke of church services, seminary classes, choral concerts, conflict resolution, families, and what they did to help those who didn’t have families supporting them. There was a sense of communal shalom behind those walls that I was not expecting to see—not only behind prison gates, but on this Earth ever.
 
In his book Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice that Restores, Dominique Gilliard maps out what Biblical justice is:
 
“Biblically, justice is a divine act of reparation where breached relationships are renewed and victims, offenders, and communities are restored. Justice, therefore is about relationships and our conduct within them. Justice asks, How is righteousness embodied and exuded in how I live in relation to God, neighbor, and creation?” (Rethinking Incarceration, 139)
 
I discuss how injustice begins with dehumanization in the first chapter of my book A Smoldering Wick. Believing in the Imago Dei imprinted on every human being means we must actively fight against dehumanization: which can be in the form of lowering another’s God-given self worth and in the form of exalting another human to demigod status. In both instances, the dehumanizer is taking away the humanity of another human being. In both instances, the dehumanizer is playing God and marring the identity of the other.
 
“Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26)
 
As Christians, working toward the reconciliation of people (including ourselves!) with God, with self, with each other, and with creation involves coming face to face with dehumanization in all its forms. For example, it’s quite easy for me as a writer to dehumanize successful writers. I imagine them living their easy lives and being fed publishing contracts and speaking opportunities and it’s just so easy in that moment to both negate their humanity and to justify my jealousy. What areas can you easily justify dehumanization?
 
Being a Christian means we recognize the areas we dehumanize others, and we hold captive those thoughts and submit them to our God who says every human being was made in His image. Being a Christian means we also call out dehumanization when it is happening to others. We cannot be lukewarm bystanders.
 
Gilliard brings to light the call of the prison chaplain. “Responsible chaplaincy entails holistic ministry: caring for the soul and body.” I saw this embodied so well at Walker. The faithfulness of the chaplain we met with was evident not by what he was telling us, but rather by what the men around him would say about him. Gilliard continues, “The best chaplains take time to learn about the systems and structures funneling people into their parish. They educate themselves about systemic injustice—not to condone or encourage a victim mentality, nor to excuse criminal behavior—because this equips them to do contextualized ministry.”
 
I was asked recently how people can get involved in the issues surrounding immigration in the United States. While I will be devoting a whole section in my book to address this, I think it’s important to see what Gilliard says here. For those looking to get involved in the ministry of reconciliation among immigrants, one very important step is to learn about the systems and structures that are funneling people to the border. I won’t say this is the first step or even the best step, but it is an important one that must come alongside a self awareness that says we are not immune to dehumanizing forces.
 
It’s easy for me to say I’d never speak to an immigrant the way I saw Border Patrol doing so, but if that was my job and I couldn’t find another and I had children to feed and house, well, who knows? I have to be careful not to dehumanize those who seem to be clear dehumanizers, and remember that I am as prone to wander as my Border Patrol brother is.
 
“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. . . Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of starts. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” said Martin Luther King Jr. in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
 
Darkness is within us as much as it is in the unjust systems we often unwillingly perpetuate. But light is also within, and seeing Walker County Faith & Character Prison is a beautiful reminder that community is capable of bringing out the light within us. And community is capable of calling our systems to what Paul calls “a more excellent way” — the way of love.